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We the People Lost Again

Friday, December 18, 2009

We the People Lost Again

by

Abby Zimet

The tireless Dennis Kucinich told it like it was at a committee hearing on the economy
this week. He blasted the bailouts and its inequities for turning Wall
Street into "fat city" and the rest of us into its victims.

"Class warfare is over - we lost," he said before the Committee on
Oversight and Government Reform. "Working people lost. The middle class
lost.

The harrowing comments from Kucinich, who is Chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee, come amidst a national unemployment rate of 10 percent, one year and several months after the economic collapse of 2008 has marred the livelihoods of many.

"Don't tell me about class warfare," he continued. "Come to my neighborhoods in Cleveland. I will show you class warfare. I'll show you hollowed out areas. I'll show you businesses that went down because they don't have access to capital. And on Wall Street it is fat city. Don't tell me about class warfare."

Kucinich, a former presidential candidate who is viewed across the
nation as a progressive champion on many issues, said that despite the
recent uptick in economic figures, many regular Americans continue to
struggle.

"All
across this country people are starved for capital," Kucinich said.
"Small businesses are failing, you have shopping centers that are
becoming vacant because people can't afford the rents anymore because
the people who own the malls the developers are getting cash calls and
credit is tightening."

"The separation between the finance economy
and the real economy is real. This is not some fake idea. You can't
call that class warfare. That's a fact."

Kucinich, who voted
against the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (also known as
the Wall Street bailout), lamented it as a catalyzing force for the rising inequality
of income in the United States.

"The wealth of this nation is
being accelerated upward," Kucinich said. "That's one of the problems
that I had with the bailout."

"You could say that it helped
stabilize the American economy, but what I see is the separation between
the real economy and Wall Street. Wall Street is stabilizing, markets
are a lot better, banks are doing well -- they parked their money at the
Fed for a while so they could get higher interest rates."

Further

Whew. That was way too close for comfort. And yeah, the country's in a sorry state to have come to this. But not only does Doug Jones become the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Alabama in 25 years; his win is a blunt rejection of all the hate-mongering, gay-bashing, race-baiting, sexual-assaulting, serial lying crap of losers Moore and Trump and Bannon and their ugly ilk. Forward to mid-terms. And once and for all, to Moore in all his evil: "Fuck you and the horse you (badly) rode in on."